Come up and analyze me some time.

Question 1: Silverman writes, "The 'talking cure' films also deprivilege the female psyche by denying to woman any possibility of arriving at self-knowledge except through the intervening agency of a doctor or analyst" (65). So doesn't this use of a male "medium" (i.e. doctor or analyst) mirror the medium of film & the use of the filmic apparatus to distance the male viewer from conscious knowing/facing his lack? I think Silverman would definitely say yes, since she talks a lot about how men are portrayed as striving to be "exterior" to the cinematic space, while women are portrayed as "exterior" to it. However, part of Silverman's larger point seems to be that classic cinema establishes gender boundaries through the voice. Yet if the use a male medium for women to tell their tales--constructing them in the interior of the film--mirrors the cinematic apparatus, rather than deprivileging women, wouldn't this actually break down the boundary between genders? In other words, if we ALL experience lack, and therefore interiorized through castration, but men can become exteriorized in classic cinema through identification with the cinematic apparatus (i.e. bodiless voice-over, etc.), isn't then the image of a woman telling her story to a male medium really just an extra layer of "othering" for the same process that men go through? I guess you could say that by portraying only women in the role of "lacking and in need of apparatus," then yes, gender boundaries are being forced onto women by associating them with lacking individuals and men without lack. However, there are plenty of men in films (though I can unfortunately only think of television episodes right now) who go to see an analyst or doctor. Thus, what's really going on with this type of scene is a rupture in the cinematic suture that covers over the fact that we need an apparatus to get at what we lack, which in turn is a never-ending, unfulfilling process.

Question 2: Silverman also writes, "The third of the operations through which Hollywood reinscribes the opposition between diegetic interiority and exteriority into the narrative itself is by depositing the female body into the female voice in the guise of accent, speech impediment, timbre, or 'gran.' This vocal corporealization is to be distinguished from that which gives the sounds emitted by Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, or Lauren Bacall their distinctive quality, since in each of these last instances it is a 'male' rather than a 'female' body which is deposited into the voice. Otherwise stated, the lowness and huskiness of each of these three voice connote masculinity rather than feminity, so that the voice seems to exceed the gender of the body from which is proceeds. That excess confers upon it a privileged status vis-a-vis both language and sexuality" (61).

Okay, I get the first part of that--the "depositing the female body into the female voice..." part--but my question is about the sexualization of Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, and Lauren Bacall. It's unquestionable that these three women were super sexy in their respective days. But what's unclear is how their "male" type voices, in combination with their overt desirability and sexiness, link to castration anxiety and the oedipus complex in the men who are drooling over them.